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How To Access The API Within DynECT 5.0

Bob Dylan once sang, “The times…they are a’changin‘”. This is true of many things and Dyn is no exception.

If you’ve been a DynECT Managed DNS client the past few years, you may have noticed that your advanced services have changed in the way they are packaged and listed. This is done so that all of the functionality available within our portal is condensed in a more logical and easy to digest format.

For example, what used to be called Round Robin Load Balancing is simply Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) with every IP address in the global pool as it didn’t make sense for these two services to be shown differently within the portal. Also, Geo Traffic Management and Real Time Traffic Management (RTTM) are now sold in a single package so they are now represented that way in our managed portal.

This logical setup has a bit of a trickle down effect on our API access. Traffic Management now includes the formerly separate Load Balancing, CDN Manager and DTM Traffic Manager services, yet all three services still have separate API documentation. This is done because currently running services, enabled prior to the new service architecture, are still accessed by them.

A screen shot of the DynECT Managed DNS portal

However, once on the new service architecture, all three API calls are no longer needed. When using the new services, the only API calls you need are the GSLB calls below if you have enabled Traffic Management. (Note that you need to be logged in to DynECT Managed DNS to access.)

The Active Failover advanced feature, which allows for the automatic switch to a second IP address or CNAME, is essentially unchanged. In this case if you have Active Failover in use, these API calls are used to control your service:

If you are running either Geo Traffic Management to direct users on a country-by-country basis to different sites or RTTM to automatically serve the lowest latency servers for a region, you use their similarly named APIs:

These are the only changes/tweaks in the API usage for the new services. How they are applied is exactly as before and if you would like to see some examples of this, check out our github repo and if you do anything cool with it or have questions, please let us know in the comments below or hit us up on Twitter!

Kevin Gray is a employee at Oracle Dyn Global Business Unit, a pioneer in managed DNS and a leader in cloud-based infrastructure that connects users with digital content and experiences across a global internet.